Merrin,
W. (2001) 'To play with phantoms: Jean Baudrillard
and the evil demon of the simulacrum', in Economy and Society, Vol
30, No 1: 85 - 111.

[This is an attempt to defend Baudrillard against those who want to
criticise him as celebrating postmodernism and its effects and ignoring
material realities --{ a very common way in which his work was received
in Britain, largely through the lens of various kinds of marxists
including gramscians}. Baudrillard in fact wants to oppose the
development of hyperreality, although Merrin thinks that the grounds on
which he bases his opposition are flawed. This article traces the
development of and debates about hyperreality from early philosophical
concerns about the simulacrum and its tendency to break away from
symbolic and social life to occupy a level of reality of its own. It
then considers ways in which this development might be resisted -- by
attempting to strengthen the symbolic again; by discovering the playful
aspects of representation as in 'seduction' [what I take to mean
playful 'signification']; by invoking a development within hyperreality
itself, which I see as akin to Deleuze's notion of how cinematic
representation tends to allude to something unrepresentable. Other
possibilities in different traditions are not discussed, however:
seeing objective reality as something which is incapable of being fully
represented, as in Adorno's argument that
concepts can never capture reality; appealing to some level of meaning
which is pre-representational as in the 'semiotic chora' of feminist
work.]

Baudrillard's work on simulation and the simulacrum has become the
central motif of his work for many British critics, and he has
attracted considerable criticism for being pretentious, idealist, an
apologist for postmodernism, and so on. It has become common to
contrast such analysis to variants of Marxist materialism [or in
my case, to the materiality of everyday life]. In fact, Baudrillard
himself has written many pieces about simulacra, and these writings
show both an important context or tradition, and a development.
Baudrillard is recognising the nihilism of hyperreality, but not
supporting it: indeed, he is trying to 'discover and formulate a
position from which it is possible to oppose the simulacrum' (88). He
recognises that it is not enough simply to reassert a notion of the
real, however.

The simulation/simulacrum, or image, has long been seen as a
paradoxical human discovery. On the one hand, it permits us to
symbolise, to do semiotics, to code ways of life. But on the other, the
image and its world can come to confuse us, be taken for reality
itself, and, finally, replace reality. What is described here is a kind
of historical process, as meaning drifts from symbolic through semiotic
to simulacrum [as in 'the precession of simulacra' in Simulations, a
text which is not referred to here]. The first statement of how this
drift occurs can be found in the early work on the political economy of
the sign: just like commodities, where exchange value develops as an
abstract force all its own, so the signifier breaks away from the
signified and the referent and becomes 'arbitrary'. Reality itself is
reduced to being 'a product of the sign' (90), and signs produce
a 'reality effect'. What must be done to control this process is
to revive the symbolic level, as in Durkheim [where symbols code
ways of life -- presumably, the symbolic still has the power to produce
new and different signs, or to take on some power beyond that which is
represented in the sign].

If this early work talks about the dangers of drift in the shift to the
semiotic level, 'Baudrillard now seeks to escalate this picture
dramatically' (90), in the familiar argument that signs increasingly
take on functions and meanings by relating entirely to themselves. Any
connection to social or political themes is lost [hint here of
the 'precession of simulacra'-- 90], as the sign becomes emancipated.
This brings about a position of complete relativity as far as
representation goes, and finally any referent whatsoever gets lost. [At
this point, the argument reminds me of debates about the exchange of
currencies in economics, and how they have become detached from the
gold standard, the then from the actual industrial production of goods,
so that currency exchange itself is a source of making money, in the
peculiarly abstract world of the futures trader, for example]. This is
not a good result, since it leads ultimately to a loss of social and
human value. Merrin wants to suggest that Baudrillard's history is
suspect, in fact, and that there is an earlier philosophical tradition
which can cast light on this important process. [He also wants to
suggest that the conceptual boundary between symbolic and semiotic
orders is a problem -- 91 -- and seems to indicate a nostalgia for
simpler forms of social solidarity -- see below].

Merrin sketches in a whole historical tradition, beginning with the
Greeks, which offers criticism of the tendency towards developing
images and simulations. On the one hand, images are seen as enabling us
to manipulate the real. On the other hand, images seem to offer a
threat to our understanding of the real: several examples are provided,
pages 92 - 3, but perhaps the best one is found in the debates about
idolatry in the Christian tradition. Idols and 'graven images' can help
to represent the sacred, but also tend to replace it, indicating the
notion of a good or evil simulacrum, 'as mediating or eclipsing the
divine' (93). False images tend to threaten the very basis of attempts
to understand and grasp reality, and much philosophy turns on how to
guarantee the truth and efficacy of 'images' [ images here
include models of social life or scientific theories. In another
fascinating example, Merrin discusses empiricism as one approach aiming
at such a guarantee, and explains its problems as relating to simulacra
again -- in this case, connected to the ultimate unreliability of the
senses which cannot be guaranteed to avoid producing a mere simulacrum
of the world -- 94].

These examples underpin the anti-foundational arguments in Baudrillard,
and in many others. The debate finds an echo in the discussions of
mechanical reproduction involving Benjamin [and Adorno], and the
anxiety that mechanical reproduction misleads by stripping away
authenticity or 'aura'. There are also clear connections with Marx on the commodity and its tendency towards
fetishised misunderstanding. Merrin argues that Marx still retained the
hope that the inverted understanding could be finally rectified, and
traces the same hope through Adorno and
Horkheimer on the culture industry [if it is there, it is well
buried!], or Debord on the society of the spectacle. Merrin detects the
same hope in the famous criticism of Baudrillard that he had simply
overlooked the reality of the (first) Gulf War in his notorious and
provocative view that it had only happened on TV.

Merrin's survey of the long philosophical struggle to control the image
leaves him feeling more pessimistic. In Baudrillard's case, there is an
attempt simply to reawaken an oppositional symbolic level to restrain
the world of appearances. However, even Durkheim realised that
simulation was already an important part of the symbolic, that mimesis
and totemism became essential for effective reproduction 'giving access
to its restorative and regenerative energies and producing that
communal experience that Baudrillard understands as a symbolic
relationship' (97) [Indeed, the whole point is that the religious is an
image of the ideal society?]. It seems the same problem has recurred
here -- there must be good and bad aspects of the symbolic as well as
of the simulacrum. In effect, Baudrillard is forced to claim the
symbolic as 'a guaranteed real', and to tell the story of the
emergence of hyperreality in the familiar terms of the corruption and
demonisation arising from the image.

As a result, a change occurs in Baudrillard's work, and a new potential
is discovered in the sign to permit the extension of the symbolic. This
argument is expressed in terms of the contrast between production
[of signs in this case] and seduction 'which involves "a
mastering of the realm of appearances"... in a game of signs creating a
symbolic relationship -- to other participants or witnesses, to the
order of appearances, or to the world itself' (98). [So that people can
play with signs and engage in signification as a creative act instead
of 'serious' representation?]. This process can be critical [by
revealing the processes involved in representation?]. At the same time,
there is the danger that this excessive and sophisticated signification
will lead to hyperreality, an image that is more real than the real,
that has been subject to 'an excessive semio-realization of the
real' (98).

Pornography demonstrates the tendency towards hyperreality, as a
representation that transcends any actual sexual experience in its
detail, its well-organised fantasy, its gynaecological reality.
Baudrillard reserves the term 'obscene' as referring to 'that
which is over-exposed, over-represented, and over signified in
the "all -too-visible"' (98). Playfulness and seduction are
replaced by excessive realism, leading to the inability to resist the
hyperreal representation, the absence of any way to reciprocate or
respond to it -- 'meaning is absolutely signified rather than
reciprocally actualized, and... everything is resolved into a single
"hyperreal" dimension' (98). [I think this takes care of
the usual celebrations of the 'active viewer' able to interpret images
in their own way, preserving the subjectivity, and offering a kind of
in-built cultural resistance -- to put it in much simpler terms, the
professionals who construct images have already added all these
intertextual and mildly subversive meanings, leaving nothing for the
viewer to do: check out the hyperreality of the Nike advertisement]. Again, the same themes
of the absence of symbolic exchange, the reciprocal pursuit of meaning,
are found in the work of other philosophers (99). Modern culture is
pornographic, devoted to 'the hypervisibility of the world' (99)
[and there's a hint that meaning increasingly becomes the province of
the technician and expert in representation].

The drive to produce even more perfect copies of the real ends by
exterminating the real, and produces disenchantment. [I thought
of Ritzer's discussion of the paradoxes of disenchantment here.
Customers become disenchanted, for example at baseball
stadia, so the company replies by adding more enchantment, but this
eventually exhausts the possibilities on behalf of the company, leaving
the customers as mere spectators, with nothing to add]. Production
replaces seduction

However, this very perfection leads us dissatisfied and suspicious.
Merrin quotes Barthes here on the ways in which perfectly realist
photographs still do not manage to capture the person. Hyperreality
leads to banality -- 'such a level of obviousness... [that]... no
relationship is possible: there is no passion, no investment or
belief... our only response is stupefied acceptance' (100). The real
becomes something that is dead, fully visible, fully captured and fully
signified. Baudrillard continues to try to find something that might be
the basis of resistance -- including the refusal of simple realities in
modern nuclear physics (101). He even refers to '"an authentic form of
simulation as well as an inauthentic form of simulation"' (101). He
seems to have in mind ironic versions of reality such as trompe de l'oeuil or Andy Warhol's
reproductions [or, presumably avant garde
art or film designed to challenge representations -- which was a
source of hope for Adorno, in the short term at least, until
recuperation]. Merrin cites a notion in Baudelaire of a work of art
which can transcend itself, become an 'absolute commodity',
delivering irony and a sense of playfulness again as a seductive
object. Apparently, photography and other forms of technology can
deliver these results, allowing viewers to go beyond representation and
realism [the examples I think of here are the female 'narrative
stoppers' referred to in Mulvey who break out
of conventional representations of women by the sheer unrepresentable
challenge of their image; or the tendency of cinema in particular to
allude to something unrepresentable, the 'sublime' in Deleuze's
discussion].

Although this seems a more sophisticated analysis than the one that
simply opposed the symbolic to the hyperreal, there still may be a
lingering notion of some authentic 'real' at work. Later discussions
turn on the important role of 'the double' in human culture: in
its authentic forms, this was a nonalienated doubling [a profane and a
sacred person? early roles?]. In its modern form, this double dimension
is collapsed into hyperreality. But this produces familiar problems
with authenticity, and seems to admit that some form of representative
doubling was always present in human culture [which leaves us with the
problem of separating out good and bad versions of the simulacrum
again]. Lyotard apparently specifically compares this notion to the
familiar one of distinguishing between good and bad savages in Western
racism [one which is not far away from the discussions of authenticity
in tourism, of course].

[Baudrillard has encountered the familiar problem noted by other
critics of postmodernism -- that anti-foundationalism is based upon a
new foundation, that claims that there is nothing outside the text are
based on some Archimedian perspective outside a text]. He is left with
trying to develop critical possibilities that cannot be incorporated in
hyperreality --'his aim is not for theory to be true, passively to
reflect the real (as then it is no longer needed, being reduced
to obviousness, and uselessness); rather theory should not be true...
but should provoke an agonistic opposition' (104) [sounds like Critical
Theory to me]. In this sense, theory is a 'good' simulacrum, used to
challenge reality. However, Baudrillard realises that reality can still
incorporate critical theories, can absorb them in a new 'bad'
hyperreality [much in the same way that the Disney Company
incorporates and caters for cultural critics by offering a kind of
commercial irony just for them]. Ironically, this is what has happened
to Baudrillard's notion of hyperreality -- it has become obvious,
unremarkable, banal. [This is also what Morris means, presumably, by
her argument that Cultural Studies has become banal -- its little
platitudes, the eternal opposition between hegemony and resistance,
have become obvious and unremarkable]. Theories always seem to risk
this, because in their very formulation, they are encouraging the
process of simulation and hyperreality. [The consequences seem clear --
to develop the negative, the unincorporatable, the esoteric, as in
Critical Theory, or to develop the outrageous, ludicrously
speculative and verbally provocative as in Baudrillard].

Merrin believes that hyperreality has won and that Baudrillard has
become incorporated and banal, that his work has been reduced to the
simple idea of the simulacrum taking over, losing all its critical
implications. [There's also the effect of student textbooks
acknowledged here]. Everyone now knows that simulation has won, and so
Baudrillard's critique is a commonplace. 'For his work is not wrong,
but too true: the simulacrum
has become reality and this is his end; the game is over' (106). The
only way that Baudrillard continues to have importance is as a straw
man, a target for those who wish to reassert an appeal to reality
[compare this with the straw men of Cultural Studies -- 'orthodox
marxism', Critical Theory, the textbook version]. They have to keep him
alive and defend him in order to represent him as a threat.

Merrin concludes that those who dabble with simulations end up being
consumed by them [applied to academic theorists and academic
simulacra, I think this is indisputable -- radical critics end up on
Open University syllabuses as a series of bullet points].